In a world where consumers are bombarded with endless ads and promotions, how can businesses stand out and capture their attention? The answer lies in content marketing, a powerful content marketing strategy that not only attracts and engages audiences, but also builds lasting relationships and drives profitable customer action.
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15 content marketing tips
In this article, we’ll offer some content marketing tips that’ll help you put together a strategy that fits your business. To contextualize the tips, we’ll discuss a few content marketing examples along the way.
01. Get to know your audience
Creating personalized content that your audience will love becomes easier as you gain a deeper understanding of your audience’s needs and interests. While it’s impossible to speak to each of your potential customers, it can help to create buyer personas that put you in your customers’ shoes. Buyer personas can help you make sense of the data that you gather. They should include details about your buyers’ interests, pain points and behaviors as well as demographics and spending power. You can find this information by speaking with your internal teams (such as your customer support team that regularly interacts with customers), sifting through any existing content analytics and consulting outside sources (like forums where your target audience is active).
02. Set SMART goals
When setting goals for your content strategy, make sure they’re SMART—i.e., specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. That way, you’ll be able to determine at any point if you’re on the right track or if you need to go back to the drawing board.
For example, if your objective is to grow your mailing list, a SMART goal might look like this: “We want to get 1,000 new mailing list sign-ups by the end of the quarter.” With this goal in mind, you can begin planning content that drives this particular action, like adding more CTAs to your posts, incentivizing new sign-ups or releasing exclusive content in your newsletter.
03. Track your performance and analyze the results
By tracking the performance of your content strategy, you can identify what's working well and what needs improvement. Then, you can make data-driven decisions to optimize your content strategy.
Use tools such as Wix Analytics to monitor metrics like page views, unique visitors, time on site, bounce rate, conversion rate and traffic sources. Using the example from the previous section, you can use Wix Analytics to determine if your email subscribers are increasing at a steady rate. If they’re not, you know that you need to tweak your content strategy.
Once you have data, analyze it to identify patterns and insights. Look for trends in traffic and engagement to understand what types of content are resonating with your audience. Identify your top-performing content, and try to replicate its success with future content. Look for areas of improvement, such as high bounce rates or low engagement rates, and use that to inform changes to your content.
04. Research your competition
Whether you’re building a content strategy or launching a new campaign, it’s critical to know what your direct competitors are doing before distributing your own content. Look at the type of content that your competitors are producing, the topics that they’re covering and the channels that they’re using to distribute their content. This will help you identify gaps in the market and opportunities to create high-quality content that stands out.
To conduct this research, start by making a list of your top competitors in your industry or niche. Then, take a deep dive into their content marketing strategy by reviewing their website, social media accounts and other online channels where they share content. You can also use tools—like Semrush for SEO, Buzzsumo for social media and SimilarWeb for traffic sources—to get deeper insight into their performance. While you’re performing this audit of your competitors, try to answer the following questions:
What topics are my competitors covering?
What content resonates with their audience the most (based on shares, likes, comments and other indicators)?
Is there an area that my competitor isn’t covering that I can focus on?
What questions or complaints does my competitor receive?
Which channels are my competitors most active on?
Once you have a good understanding of what your competitors are doing, look for ways to differentiate yourself and offer something unique to your audience. This might involve covering topics that your competitors haven't explored, using different content formats or distributing your content on new channels.
05. Make a content calendar
Creating a well-planned content calendar can help you make sure that your content is consistently relevant, timely and valuable to your audience. Plus, content marketing can get overwhelming really quickly. By planning your content in advance, you can create a more efficient workflow.
If your content marketing strategy is complex and involves multiple people, consider investing in a project management tool to keep track of tasks, set due dates and move things around with ease. For example, you could use Monday.com to manage your content calendar, as well as keep track of what still needs to be done for each post. To keep things simple, you can build your own calendar on Google Sheets using many of the free online templates available.
06. Employ multiple distribution methods
Using multiple distribution methods doesn’t just mean promoting content on different platforms. It also means using different types of content to promote one another.
For example, if you publish a new blog post up on your website, you can promote it on social media, include it in an email or even use paid advertising to reach a larger audience. Similarly, if you release a new video on your YouTube channel, you can share it on social media, embed it in a blog post or include it in an email.
To ensure that you’re distributing your content effectively, use your content calendar to keep track of your distribution plans. Make sure you’re thinking strategically about each distribution decision. Take the time to consider which channels will be most effective for reaching your target audience, and tailor your distribution strategy accordingly.
07. Repurpose your content
Using multiple distribution methods and repurposing your content go hand-in-hand, but they’re not the same thing. While employing multiple distribution methods involves promoting a single piece of content on different channels to drive traffic back to it, repurposing content involves transforming it into a new format to maximize its reach and engagement.
For instance, if you have a blog post that performed well and received positive feedback from your audience, you could repurpose it into a webinar or a podcast to cater to those who prefer watching or listening to content over reading it. Alternatively, you could use the same blog post to create social media posts or different types of infographics to reach audiences on platforms like Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. Utilizing tools like AI content generators or AI writing tools to alter blogs for other purposes content can make this process even more efficient.
Repurposing your content can help you reach new audiences and save you time and resources. Instead of creating new content from scratch, you can leverage what you already have and adapt it to different platforms and formats. In doing so, you can maximize the value of your content and keep your audience engaged across multiple channels, just by changing the way you deliver your message.
08. Aim to serve instead of sell
A common mistake brands make with content marketing is only creating content that’s designed to generate sales. Although sales may be the end goal, the real value of content marketing is that it gives you the opportunity to build relationships with your target audience and earn their trust over time. Therefore, the primary goal of your content marketing strategy should be to inform, educate or entertain your audience—as opposed to pitching your product left and right.
If you run a video creation agency, for example, you might start by posting samples of your best work and sharing expert tips on filming techniques. This type of content will help your audience see you as a trusted authority in your field, making them more likely to choose your agency when they’re in need of video services. Once you’ve established a foundation of trust with your audience, you can start to share content that more directly promotes your products or services.
09. Retarget your audience with your content
If you’ve managed to engage your target audience with content marketing but haven’t gotten them to convert, then retargeting could prove useful. Retargeting is a strategy in which you serve ads to users who have interacted with your content in the past but have not taken a specific action. By reintroducing the same or similar content in a different format or channel, you can increase the chances of converting those users into customers.
You can set up retargeting campaigns on advertising platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads. To build your audience, you’ll either need to provide a list of existing contacts or install a pixel on your site. Afterwards, you can create ads that borrow from your existing content and reiterate messages that appealed to your audience the first time they landed on your site. Because you work hard on creating content, it’s worth allocating some money to a retargeting campaign to make sure that it reaches its full potential.
10. Optimize the user experience
One reason users might have bounced from a page or glossed over a piece of content you posted is that you didn’t take the user experience into consideration.
If content is king, then user experience (UX) is queen. When the UX design of a site is poor (meaning that it’s not easy or enjoyable to use), users may bounce from your page without giving your content a chance. Therefore, it’s just as important to optimize the quality of your site as it is to optimize the quality of the content itself.
At its core, the purpose of UX design is to make a site easy to navigate, read and interact with. Check that your webpages load quickly, buttons are easily clickable, links lead to the correct destination and the navigation menu is as streamlined as possible.
Optimizing your page for multiple screen formats is also crucial. Studies show that we spend around 81% of our online time on mobile devices, so ensure that any piece of content you create is also tailored to the mobile experience.
Another critical element of creating a positive user experience is making your content accessible to people with disabilities. Adding alt-text to images on your page, or descriptions of visual and aural content in social media captions is a good start. Evaluating the structural hierarchy of your site content is another important step. By taking these measures, you can make your content available to a wider audience and increase its impact.
11. Follow SEO best practices
Rather than thinking about search engine optimization (SEO) as a distribution tool, think of it as the foundation for your entire content marketing strategy. SEO research can not only help you optimize your content for search engines but also provide valuable insights into your target audience’s search behavior, preferences and pain points. Therefore, SEO research can inform your decisions about what sort of content to create, how to structure it and how to make your site as a whole more user-friendly.
A good place to start would be to research keywords using a tool like Semrush or Google Trends to see what people are searching for and what keywords are attracting viewers to competitor sites.
Long-tail keywords—which are longer keywords with a lower search volume and a more narrow focus—are typically the easiest to rank for, so choose from one of those for your first piece of content. Review the top 10 articles on the keyword’s search engine results page. What topics do they cover? What questions do they answer? How are they structured? Once you have the answers to those questions, try to improve upon what’s already there with your own content.
For more SEO tips, visit the Wix SEO Hub.
12. Stay consistent and relevant
Consistency is key when it comes to building trust and authority with your audience. If your publishing schedule is inconsistent, your audience will be less likely to rely on you as a source of valuable information. A regular publishing schedule allows your audience to anticipate and expect new content from you, plus keeps your brand top of mind.
At the same time, it's crucial to ensure that your content remains relevant and up-to-date. Keep your eye on industry trends, analyze user feedback and engagement metrics on a regular basis and update your content to reflect any changes or new information.
13. Offer email marketing subscribers exclusive content
Email marketing is still one of the best content marketing strategies for conversion, with marketers receiving around $36 in return for every $1 spent. Sending subscribers exclusive content is a great way to retain existing email marketing subscribers and encourage new sign-ups.
To boost engagement and conversions even further, try segmenting your mailing list based on your subscribers’ interests, needs or pain points. By doing this, you can offer personalized and highly relevant content that resonates with each group. This strategy will show your audience that you truly understand their specific needs and interests. Plus, it's a great way to show that you value their time by providing them with content that's tailored to their individual preferences.
14. Update old content instead of only creating new content
Updating existing content is arguably just as important as creating new pieces. We at the Wix Blog revisit our most important articles on a yearly basis to make sure that they’re accurate and up-to-date. We ask ourselves questions like, is an article’s position on the relevant SERPs stable? Is the content still accurate and as complete as it can be? Are all the links inside a blog working and leading users to fresh content? If the answer to any of these questions is no, then we know that the piece is due for refresh.
Don’t update all of your old content at once. Instead, perform a content audit to identify the posts that are worth updating. Tend to a few of them each month and leave the rest of the calendar open for new content. Remember, refreshing your old content doesn't mean neglecting new content creation. By keeping a balance between the two, you can ensure that your content is always fresh, relevant and engaging for your audience.
15. Keep your brand voice consistent
While there may be many moving parts of your content marketing strategy, the best way to tie them all together is to make sure your brand voice is consistent across all of your content. If your blog uses a professional and elevated tone, but your social media is casual and informal, your audience may get confused about your brand identity.
Consistency builds trust and improves brand awareness, allowing your audience to immediately recognize your brand through your unique voice. Whether it's a social media post, a blog post, a podcast or a video, ensure that your voice always embodies your brand.